


Hungry

by castletongreen



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horrortale, Cannibalism, HorrorTale Sans, Horrortale Papyrus, Origin Story, horrortale toriel - Freeform, horrortale undyne - Freeform, minor body horror?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 23:24:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7911610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/castletongreen/pseuds/castletongreen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sans waits for a reset that will never come, growing hungrier each day. He has to eat something eventually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hungry

Every day he woke up hungry. He had lost track of how long it had been since Papyrus, too, had lost his ability to make food, erupting in a shrieking tantrum and locking himself in his room with a horde of monsters pressing at their door, begging, demanding, insulting, even. Sans had only summoned his blasters and the crowd had fled in a hysterical frenzy. Monster food was magic, and like all the magic in the underground, it was entirely fueled by a monster’s emotions--hope, love, kindness. It was only a matter of time before feeding the entire town, and even some travelers all the way from Waterfall and Hotland, took its toll on Papyrus’s SOUL. Sans hadn’t expected his brother to last as long as he did.

 

It doesn’t matter, Sans told himself. It’s just going to be reset.

 

But every day he woke up to the very next day. And every day he woke up hungry. Toriel told him, in a fit of sobbing panic, that the monsters in the ruins were ‘falling down’ left and right. She told him about the awful thoughts that ran through her head when she saw their bodies, undusted, yet limp and lifeless like a human corpse. She told him hunger and isolation were driving her insane. She wanted him to tell her it was wrong, what she was considering. To tell her not to do it.

 

It doesn’t matter, he’d told her. Do whatever you want. That was the last time they’d spoken.

 

The first one he’d actually seen try it was Gyftrot, its vertical jaws knawing on the wing of a screaming, completely lucid Chilldrake. Papyrus had started yelling and driven the beast away, then carried the Chilldrake back to its family. Sans wished his brother weren’t so stubborn. He wondered if he still would have stopped it the Chilldrake had ‘fallen down,’ like the monsters in the ruins. “We must not let these dark times get the better of us!” Papyrus had announced, though Sans caught an edge of hysteria in his voice. He noted the concentration it took for Papyrus to keep smiling. He knew his brother was hungry, too.

 

But it didn’t matter. Tomorrow it would all just be a bad dream, and he would find the human making their way through the forest, and he would creep up behind them and they would turn around and shake his hand, and he wouldn’t even mind how much dust was on their clothes because the nightmare would be over.

 

But tomorrow came, and he was still hungry. It was getting harder and harder to wake up. If Papyrus didn’t call his name to wake him every morning, he didn’t think he’d bother. He’d taken to actually patrolling the forest instead of falling asleep at his station like he used to, worried he would never wake up. He shuddered at the thought of his brother finding him ‘fallen down’ at his station, there in that cold forest. Papyrus didn’t deserve that.

 

It doesn’t matter. It’s just going to be reset. The words had become a mantra in his head, keeping time with his footsteps, keeping the aching hunger from driving him mad. Every day it worked a little less.

 

Queen Undyne had taken a more active roll in supervising Papyrus’s puzzles than had her predecessor. She made sure each one would work. She wanted each one to be lethal, until Papyrus brought up the concern that monster children might get caught in them. Undyne compromised, though Papyrus was still worried about people (he said people, yes, not monsters, and Undyne had noted the difference) getting seriously injured. He patrolled, or asked Sans to patrol, the traps twice a day to make sure nothing was caught in them.

 

Sans wished he would skip a day. He wished he would find a monster impaled on a spike, or stuck in a deep pit, so cold and injured and hopeless that it had given up and fallen down. He wondered what Papyrus would say if he brought home fresh meat one night, if he would ask where it had come from. He would never do it, he told himself. It was just a thought.

 

But when he heard the bone-chilling shriek that day on patrol, he had taken a shortcut to get to the caught creature before his brother could hear and he didn’t know _what_ he was planning to do but when he’d seen it, seen the red liquid gushing from the leg gnashed in a hinged spike-trap, seen its pleading eyes staring up at him, he’d just. Stopped.

 

Stopped because that. _That_ should be impossible.

 

His breath comes out in a horrible giggle, high-pitched and completely unfamiliar, like someone else’s laugh. It terrifies him, but he can’t stop himself. It’s everything he’d been holding in up to that point forcing itself through his teeth in a mad, unnatural cackle.

 

“I’ve never seen _you_ before,” he tells the human.

 

The look on the human’s face...he’d never seen anything so scared. So scared of him. It takes him a moment to catch up with himself enough to notice he hasn’t stopped cackling, raspy and bone-rattling and he doubles over and clutches is non-existant gut, and he’s so, _so_ hungry, and. And.

 

And...oh god, the kid’s never coming back.

 

“This...heh....this is it...” he manages, as tears fill his eyesockets, feeling the emptiness in his gut like something apart from him, some separate and powerful force whispering, urging, _begging_. “This is...all there is....” he laughs.

 

Papyrus doesn’t ask any questions, just wordlessly accepts Sans’s excuse that he’d taken a trip to the capital to buy supplies. Sans knows he’d be able to read his brother’s face like a book, and he very carefully avoids looking at him. He believes me, Sans thinks, he trusts me. It’s brother’s greatest flaw.

 

The house is almost unbearably silent while Papyrus cooks. Sans resists the urge to check outside, worried the smell would attract a crowd of begging monsters. It smells good, better than any of his brother’s cooking has ever smelled. It looks good, too, Sans thinks when Papyrus places the steaming plate of spaghetti in front of him. It takes all his concentration to wait for his brother to sit down before tearing into it, forgoing his fork, letting the red juices drip down his chin.

 

“It’s good,” he murmurs through a full mouth, and his body is heaving with sobs or laughter, he doesn’t know which, tears streaming down his cheekbones, but he doesn’t stop. “...God, Pap, it’s so good.”

 

He doesn’t stop when Papyrus sets down his fork with a shaky hand, or when he sets his plate, half-eaten, in front of Sans after he’d finished his own, or even when his brother stalks calmly and quietly upstairs to lock himself in his room.


End file.
